Visualization of meteorological data provides a useful tool for searching and analyzing weather conditions over a time period of interest. Typical approach for weather data visualization involves displaying an image of a map that represents a geographical area of interest and overlaying another image that indicates spatial coverage of precipitation together with precipitation intensity during a time period of interest on the map image.
Weather data visualization tools that are currently available typically enable displaying weather data for a predefined geographical area and selecting a rather coarse selection of a time period of interest. Examples of known approaches for selecting the time period of interest include selecting a weather data record of interest from a list of items presented to a user via a user interface (e.g. as a file listing) possibly together with metadata such as item size and/or time stamp associated with each listed item.
Since there is typically a vast amount of weather data available for selection, the known solutions for selecting the time period of interest may be a cumbersome and time-consuming process that often results in excess usage of computational resources, especially when browsing through time periods in an attempt to find a specific weather event or a weather event of specific characteristics.
While efficient access to such weather data is typically important for meteorological research, convenient access to such weather data likely makes it more readily applicable also in other fields of technology and business and also more readily accessible by general public.